Death Dealer

SS Kommandant Rudolph Höss (1900-1947) was history's greatest mass murderer, personally supervising the extermination of approximately two million people, mostly Jews, at the death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. Death Dealer is a new, unexpurgated translation of Höss’s autobiography, written before, during, and after his trial.

This edition includes rare photos, the minutes of the Wannsee Conference (where the Final Solution was decided and coordinated), original diagrams of the camps, a detailed chronology of important events at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Höss's final letters to his family, and a new foreword by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. Death Dealer stands as one of the most important—and chilling—documents of the Holocaust.

By his own admission, Rudolf Hoss was history's greatest mass murderer, personally supervising the extermination of approximately 2 million people, mostly Jews, at Auschwitz, Poland. This is the first complete translation into English of this cold killer's memoirs. 24-page photo insert.

ISBN-13: 9780306806988
Author : Rudolph Hoss, Steven Paskuly (Editor), Andrew Pollinger (Translator)
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Publication date: 03/01/1996

Editorial Reviews - Publishers Weekly

This first complete English translation of a senior Nazi officer's account of the Final Solution describes in cold, stomach-churning detail the program of genocide as an administrative procedure. Written during the six months before his 1947 execution in Warsaw for ``crimes committed against the Polish people,'' Hoss's memoirs are filled with specific recollections, from his fervently religious boyhood in Mannheim, through a prison term in Liepzig (for having killed a fellow soldier), to marriage and induction into the SS in 1934.

Particulars of his roles in the concentration camp system include his ordering of ``the first execution of the war'' at Sachsenhausen in 1938 and his 1941 assignment to establish and manage Auschwitz as ``the largest human killing center in all of history.'' Personal squabbles with other SS leaders are interspersed with chilling descriptions of prison conditions and gassing procedures. This compelling historical document, from which Hoss emerges as a classic model of the bureaucratic middle manager, is expertly edited by Paskuly, a history teacher in New York; Pollinger's translation is seamless. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)